Czech Constitutional Court rejects woman’s appeal against divorce
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The Czech Constitutional Court has rejected a complaint from a woman who did not want to divorce her husband and cited a serious illness. The general courts dissolved the marriage, which was concluded in 2022, and the highest instance declined to intervene, according to the published ruling.
According to the court, the husband filed for divorce just two years after the wedding. He claimed that the marriage had broken down and that the spouses had not run a joint household for more than a year. The woman did not want a divorce: she pointed to her poor health and a grade III disability. The courts dissolved the marriage nonetheless.
She then turned to the Constitutional Court. Her complaint argued that her rights to a fair trial and to family life had been violated. She faces surgery and a long recovery, and has already had to leave the family home. According to the applicant, the courts failed to take into account that her husband had insulted and beaten her, and that she had been financially dependent on him for years. Keeping the marriage intact, the woman believes, would have allowed her to maintain decent living conditions.
The panel, chaired by rapporteur judge Tomáš Langášek, called the complaint manifestly unfounded. The Constitutional Court, the judges stressed, is not there to review ordinary divorces: it can intervene only if a decision is utterly unjustified and based on arbitrariness. In this case, in their assessment, there was nothing of the kind.
No especially severe harm threatens the woman. “Divorce does not threaten the applicant with especially severe harm, since she does not depend on her husband’s care, and they do not run a joint household in any case. She has a stable income to cover her own needs and those of her children,” Langášek wrote in the ruling. The courts, he added, also took into account a possible eviction after the divorce, but did not consider the consequences severe enough to prevent the marriage from being dissolved.
Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz
